The Briefing Document is Broken
Here’s what we’ve done about it
If you work in client-side insights, you may recognize a common dilemma. Your internal clients (product, marketing, brand, etc.) come to you with a business problem that demands research. You work with them to translate that problem into a research brief & RFP. You send it to a handful of potential vendors, evaluate proposals, and award the work.
In print, this looks like a clean process. In practice, we often see that it quietly sets research up to fall short. Not because the work isn’t good, but because the brief was never designed to produce success. It was designed to produce a report.
This often puts insights managers in one of the most uncomfortable positions in the organization: the go-between.
You may find yourself feeling hampered in setting a strategic agenda. You’re fielding questions from internal stakeholders who have strong opinions about what they’d like to learn and passing these questions on to external vendors who are largely expected to respond to them as written. And once a vendor is selected and the research is finished, something about the outcome feels off: the findings didn’t connect, the recommendations didn’t translate into action or were met with general apathy.
And it’s the insights function who’s left trying to rebuild credibility.
This all-to-common occurrence isn’t a failure of skills or effort. It’s a failure of process.
What the brief was built to do - and what it wasn’t
The research brief is a helpful document, particularly for the concrete information it provides: objectives, timelines, desired scope, and (sometimes) budget ranges. It gives vendors enough information to respond, and for that narrow functional purpose, it works.
But what a brief almost never captures are the conditions that determine whether insights will change anything once delivered. Who in the organization needs to be convinced by these findings? What would it take to convince them? What specific decisions are actually on the table? How do findings need to be communicated to land with the people who matter the most? What’s gone wrong with similar projects before, and what risks are already quietly at play?
These aren’t peripheral questions. They’re the ones that generate research that moves organizations. A brief that’s optimized around research questions, without addressing how findings will be used and what internal teams need to hear to be in alignment is a brief that’s optimized for delivery — not for impact.
And in our experience, the gap between these two things is where research most often fails.
